In the future, the familiar dot-com domains on the Internet may be as outdated as today’s Myspace page.

At least, that’s what Donuts, a domain registry company, is banking on.

“We believe over time that we will effectively replace dot-com,” said Richard Tindal, co-founder and chief operating officer of Donuts.

Donuts spent $58 million to apply for 307 top-level domains, and thus far has about 190 under contract. With that tally, Donuts says it is and expects to be the owner of the most new, generic top-level domains, beating out other top applicants such as Google and Amazon .

A generic top-level domain is the ending of a Web address to the right of the dot, as in “.pizza” or “.photography”. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the nonprofit that coordinates domain names and Internet Protocol addresses, started the application program in 2012 to introduce new top-level domains to the marketplace. So far, Icann has delegated more than 640 domains, and expects to delegate about 1300 by the end of the process.

Donuts acts as a registry, meaning it sells the top-level domains to registrars such as GoDaddy. The registrar then licenses the chosen domain name to the customer, an individual or business, while Donuts runs the technical side of the domain.

“In essence, the registry operator becomes the custodian of a piece of the Internet’s core infrastructure,“ Tindal said.

Some of Donuts’ more popular domain holdings include “.technology” and “.photography.” While other domains, such as “.plumbing,” are gaining momentum but aren’t moving quite as fast, largely due to the old-school nature of the plumbing industry, Tindal said.

Top-level domains have a celebrity following with Lady Gaga’s bornthisway.foundation, Kanye West’s yeezy.supply and Demi Lovato’s lovato.club. Corporations have also jumped on board with names like generalmotors.green and Barclays’ use of “.barclays”.

In most cases, these domains are three times as much as the typical dot-com name--the average top-level domain sold by Donuts is $30, while dot-coms typically sell for about $10, Tindal said--and can sell for several thousand dollars depending on the value of the name. For example, bank.loans would fetch a much higher price than asdfa.loans, Tindal said.

One reason businesses pay for these domains rather than a dot-com or a dot-org is the“cool” factor of the suffixes, according to Tindal.

“These are just more attractive and more hip,” Tindal said.

It may help that businesses looking for a dot.com have fewer options, because the more popular names have been around longer and have already been taken, said Kurt Pritz, executive director of the Domain Name Association.

“It’s certainly true that shorter, more memorable names are more available with the new [top-level domains],” Pritz said.

Still, Pritz said the release of the new domains doesn’t necessarily mean that brands or businesses will get rid of their legacy domain. Instead, Pritz is expecting businesses to acquire new domains related to their brand in addition to the dot-coms.

“Google and Amazon have helped us immeasurably [in terms of raising awareness],” said Richard Tindal, chief operating officer of Donuts.

Tindal said Donuts has seen growth from both existing and new businesses, but in the future he expects most growth to come from new top-level domains, which will have the bigger market share.

As of the last week in May, there were 117.3 million total registered dot-com domains compared with more than 5.7 million top-level domains, according to Andrew Brier of namestat.org, a top-level domain tracking website. But on a net daily basis, new top-level domain registrations were growing approximately twice as fast as dot-com registrations.

The new generic top-level domains are also gaining traction internationally. Icann has introduced non-Latin characters for the first time, so suffixes can appear in characters such as Chinese or Cyrillic, said Akram Atallah, president of Icann’s global domains division.

“The demand has been there,” Atallah said.

The top three suffixes by volume at the end of May were “.xyz” and “.网址” which translates from Chinese to English as web address, and then “.science”, according to namestat.org. Donuts doesn't own those suffixes and Tindal said the current top-selling domains are more generic and lower priced, and thus more people are buying them.

Overall, the release of the new top-level domains was meant to introduce more innovation and increase competition in the domain space, with the hope of lowering the cost of having a web presence, said Atallah. That lowered cost is especially important for opening the Internet to users in developing countries, he said.

For the registries, just applying for a single top-level domain costs $185,000, but it can cost the applicant more to get the tech support and hosting services in place.

When there are no other applicants and the application is approved by Icann, the cost for the domain is just the $185,000, along with a $25,000 annual fee . That is relatively cheap, given how valuable some names can be.

If there are other legitimate applicants, Icann directs them to decide through private arbitration, which can involve bidding or a partnership. An exception is sometimes made for community priority, when an independent panel views an applicant as being most representative of the domain.

If it can’t be decided privately, Icann hosts an auction. In a high profile case, Google Inc. paid $25 million for “.app,” beating Amazon Inc. and other applicants.

To apply for all its names--Donuts narrowed its initial applications down to 307 from 3,000 — the company raised more than $150 million in a 2012 round led by Austin Ventures.

Donuts still has 21 active applications and is waiting on domains such as “.music” which has several other applicants including Amazon.

“The more people applied for one, the most popular it’s going to be,” Tindal said.

Amazon still has 54 active applications including “.song,” “.bot” and “.buy” listed on Icann’s site. Google still has 16 active applications, including “.map,” “.kid” and “.car.”

But Donuts said it doesn’t consider Amazon or Google to be competition, and instead credits their presence and high profile auctions for raising awareness of the new top-level domains--a key issue for their growth.